Pressure on DOJ to close center torturing disabled students

Last week, this disturbing video, successfully hidden by the Judge Rotenberg Center and their paid henchmen for eight years, was shown in a courtroom and subsequently televised, giving the public a firsthand look at the extensive and painful electric shock “treatments” students undergo at the Massachusetts school for people with special needs.

President Obama and the U. S. Department of Justice have failed for two years to respond to the recommendation of United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak to investigate JRC and its activities involving students with disabilities. Nowak was responding to this urgent appeal from Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI):

“We request that the Special Rapporteur initiate an inquiry into the abusive practices perpetrated against the residents of JRC and licensed by the State of Massachusetts. MDRI contends that the severe pain and suffering perpetrated against children and adults with disabilities at JRC violates the UN Convention against Torture. US law fails to provide needed protections to children and adults with disabilities.”

The full text of this appeal, if you take the time to read it, will shake you to your core. I already knew that JRC was delivering painful shock treatments to students it claims have challenging behaviors. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the depth of depravity of some of the actions outlined in the thorough and well-referenced investigation by MDRI.

In recent developments, on April 12, Jonathan Young, PhD, JD, Chairman of the National Council on Disability (NCD), an independent government agency on disability policy, sent this letter to the DOJ urging them to take immediate action to complete their investigation and expedite closure of JRC.

Four Decades of Abuse

Incredibly, students at the school (which has changed its name and moved three times over the course of forty years) have been subjected to these treatments NOT IN SECRET, but with full knowledge of public officials. (It’s worth noting that presidential hopeful Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts from 2003-2007, so this occurred on his watch.) Other aversive “treatments” used by JRC include restraint, sometimes for hours or weeks, seclusion and food deprivation. In fact, one young woman with a severe intellectual disability died in their care while on a food restriction of 300 calories per day in an effort to modify her behavior, though reading about her level of disability, it’s difficult to believe she had the mental capacity to connect her punishment with her “offenses” which included moaning, a communication method she used because she was non-verbal.

Regarding the shock treatments, the MDRI report reveals that JRC has, over time, modified the shocks to be more and more painful because commercially available devices had become ineffective at curbing behaviors deemed unwanted by staff. The torture device used at the time of the MDRI report,which JRC calls the Graduated Electronic Decelerator IV (a device they invented in-house for this express purpose) or GED IV, is said by MDRI to be both “painful and dangerous” delivering 45.0 milliamps RMS for 2 seconds with a peak intensity of 91 milliamps. To put this in perspective, law enforcement officers’ stun guns deliver 3-4 milliamps, though most stun guns on the market deliver 1-2. Some students received dozens, even hundreds, of shocks a day for rule violations including failing to raise their hands or not working quickly enough.

As if all of this weren’t disgusting enough, what disturbed me most was their reported use of Behavior Rehearsal Lessons (BRL’s in their macabre parlance). According to interviews, in order for students to learn that they would receive painful shocks for acting out behaviors, staff would sometimes need to elicit behaviors because the students were NOT acting out. Staff would accomplish this by doing something to the student guaranteed to elicit a difficult behavior so that they could then shock them, thus “teaching” them the price of misbehaving.

One student said two staff came into his room and put a knife to his throat to elicit a response from him. Predictably, it worked. He fought back, and they responded in turn with a shock. Another student reported they threatened him with a pencil as if they were going to stab him in the mouth asking “Do you want to eat this?”

JRC: A Strong Survival Instinct

It seems incredible that JRC has been using these practices against people with disabilities, mostly children, for forty years — not in secret, but with the full knowledge of public officials. If you really want to understand how this is possible, you need to read the MDRI appeal which painstakingly outlines how US federal and Massachusetts’ state laws fail to protect these vulnerable individuals who are powerless to opt out from this “treatment.” It’s a topic convoluted and exquisitely painful to unravel.

JRC evidently has deep financial resources and has fought off every effort thus far to shut them down or even force them to abandon these “treatments”. According to this article,which appeared this week in 219 Magazine, they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in legal and marketing fees to fend off lawsuits and keep a steady supply of new students, mostly from New York City. The average annual cost of care for a student at JRC is $220,000, mostly paid by public funds. They prey on families whose children have diagnoses including autism, ADHD, intellectual disability to name only a few. Parents must give consent for the treatment, though some claim they were not aware of the extent of the torture their children would be subjected to, while others claim it has been an effective deterrent to challenging behaviors.

But for parents who feel there are no other options, don’t be misled by the pied piper bearing electric shock backpacks. Research shows that even if aversives work temporarily, they can’t be withdrawn without regression. So what’s their end game at JRC? Torture for their residents lifelong? I imagine many of the parents of JRC residents once thought they and their school districts had tried everything. My observation has been the quality of functional behavior analysis and behavior intervention plans, even in some of the best school districts, is woefully inadequate. Shoddy observations lead to shoddy assessments lead to shoddy behavior plans that are ineffective. The $200K plus per year that feds and states are paying for this “care” might buy some top quality behavior intervention that is effective AND humane.

In NCD’s April 12 letter to DOJ, Dr. Young cites a 1995 report “Improving the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act: Making Schools Work for All of America’s Children” saying:

“While it is possible to understand the desperation of these parents, to share their exasperation with ineffective programs and treatments, and to sympathize with them in their frustration to locate appropriate programs, there are limits to what society can permit in the name of treatment. There are those in our society who would advocate for severe physical punishment or even the mutilation of prisoners convicted of what everyone would agree are heinous crimes. Yet these prisoners are afforded protection under the law from this treatment, even though there are those who would claim that such treatment would “teach them a lesson.” Students with severe behavioral disabilities are not criminals, and yet present law allows them to be subjected to procedures which cannot be used on the most hardened criminals, or, in some cases, even on animals.”

Disability advocates universally oppose the use of such extreme measures to modify behaviors. As Nowak says, the ban on torture is absolute. Though common sense and decency would say it should be easy to abolish these practices and shut down JRC, in reality it will take a well-coordinated effort of concerned advocates and everyday citizens to get President Obama and the DOJ to respond to the UN inquiry and ultimately protect individuals with disabilities from practices you couldn’t legally do to an animal or convicted murderer.